When There’s No Going Back

MOSCOW — Good protests are like great parties: everyone is there and you don’t want to be anyplace else in the world.

Current and former colleagues, joined by our friends and family members, form an ever larger clump in the crowd. There are two of my former students. There is my good friend the photographer with whom I spent most of the 1990s traveling from war zone to war zone. And here, arriving separately, is his son, a college sophomore, born the year after the Soviet Union collapsed.

He gives me his scarf to put over my head in the freezing rain. And here comes an old colleague, whose moment of fame came in August 1991, when as a 24-year-old reporter she called a coup a coup during a hardliners’ news conference — and by doing that, it seemed, brought the whole Soviet edifice tumbling down.

“I’ve lost it, you know,” she says to me. “Remember how we used to be able to tell the number of protesters by breaking the crowd into quadrants? Can’t do it anymore.” Neither can I because it’s been almost 20 years since Russia saw so many people in the streets.
There may have been five, seven or ten thousand people in the street in Moscow on Monday; it seems certain that this Saturday, when the next protest is scheduled, there will be several times as many. That’s still 10 times fewer than there were 20 years ago, but the unmistakable sense that everyone is here, that no one is talking about anything but the protests, is distinctly reminiscent of the time 20 years ago.

The problem with the Soviet regime — and the one created by Vladimir Putin in its image — is that they are closed systems whose destruction is unpredictable. There is no obvious cause-and-effect relationship between street protests and the ultimate fall of the regime because there are no mechanisms that make the government accountable to the people.

Even the most obvious recent parallel, Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, fails as a model: There the stand-off between street protesters and the government that had stolen an election was resolved by the Supreme Court, which ordered a recount and a revote. But Russia has no justice system independent of the executive branch. And worse, neither a recount nor a revote would work, since election laws have long since been rigged to allow only Kremlin-sanction parties on the ballot.

So the people who are protesting the stolen election are, in effect, demanding the dismantling of the entire system. And that, for lack of better parallels, brings us back to the fall of the U.S.S.R.

That process took five years and proceeded in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back manner. Protests were allowed, then banned, then allowed again. Dissidents were freed, then their apartments were ransacked by the police. Censorship was lifted in fits and starts. At the height of the protest movement, hundreds of thousands flooded the streets, defying not only the police but tanks, and yet it was impossible to tell whether their actions had direct consequences — because, just as now, the people had no mechanisms for holding the government accountable.

But one thing is clear in retrospect: Once the process was underway, the regime was doomed. The more hot air it pumped into the bubble in which it lived, the more vulnerable it also became to growing pressure from the outside. That is exactly what is happening now. It may take months or it may take a few years, but the Putin bubble will burst.